Promote Your Website with bizSugar

(A little social marketing goes a long way, says Matthew Ringer of SmallBizBee, who talks about how you can use a handful of tools to promote your Website to success online in this interview with BizSugar.com.)

Matt, the first thing I notice when I click on your site from BizSugar.com is the BizSugar intro at the top of each post. Can you tell us a little more about how you set that up?

That’s done with a free WordPress plugin called “Referrer Detector”, which detects visitors who came to the site via BizSugar and greets them with a customizable welcome message. It’s a great plugin that’s easy to set up, and gives your blog a little more personal feel.

Can you tell us a bit more about you and your business? How did you get started?

I own an event management company in South Florida. We focus on producing athletic events, specifically running races and adventure races (long distance relay races, etc). I have been a runner my whole life, and I naturally gravitated towards that interest when developing a business. I saw enough room for improvement both in quality of the events being produced, and in the marketing of the events, that I felt I’d have a competitive advantage. So far it’s been a success; the business has grown every year since I started it.

As for the blog, Smallbizbee.com, I developed that site as a way to share my thoughts on business, maybe help out others just getting started, and get feedback from readers on ideas I’ve been kicking around. It’s been a great learning experience for me, and very rewarding when I hear from readers telling me they got inspiration or ideas from my site that helped them get started or take their biz to another level.

What are some other resources the Website offers?

We are content, information heavy, at Smallbizbee.com. If you have a question, or want more information on branding, marketing, social media, advertising, or a host of other small business related topics we probably have it on the website. We also feature entrepreneurs via an interview series to give them some free publicity, and often have special offers that are passed onto readers via partnerships with some of the businesses we work with.

Can you tell us about any other social marketing you do for your business?

I keep it pretty simple. Our websites and blog are our home base on the internet, from there we branch out to other social networks. I’m active on Twitter where I try to provide information and value to my followers, and promote the business. We have Facebook fan pages for our events, and I mess around with social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon. Social media marketing doesn’t have to be time consuming to work; you don’t need to be on every social network for hours a day. Get a website, have a blog, use Twitter or Facebook to do some promoting, and you’re set. From there you may add another targeted, niche social networking site to bring you targeted visitors/readers/etc.

You can find Matthew Ringer hanging out at his small business website Smallbizbee.com – a website dedicated to providing small businesses and entrepreneurs the information they need in order to be successful. He is also the owner of an event management company in South Florida and provides small business, social media, and human resource consulting services. If you’d like to keep up with all that Matt’s doing follow him on Twitter.